Poor Obama was constrained to defend the point that “ISIL isn’t the Soviet Union” and we are not engaged in a world war.

“ISIS is a virulent, nasty organization that has gained a foothold in ungoverned spaces effectively in Syria and parts of western Iraq.”

Translation: The Soviet Union was at its height a country of nearly 300 million persons, with a 5-million man army and large armored divisions, an impressive air force, and nuclear warheads.

Daesh is 30,000 fighters in a few desert towns who have probably kidnapped on the order of 3 or 4 million people (most of their inhabitants have run away from them). They have a few tanks, but not that many, and no jets at all. Their main weapons are Kalashnikov machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. They are a small band of desert pirates. They aren’t very much like the Soviet Union. It is true that they also engage in terrorism, but the Paris attack focused on soft targets of no strategic significance; they didn’t pose a threat to the French state. The attack might well have been launched by radical elements in European slums if there had never been any Daesh. San Bernardino was an incident of workplace rage inspired by the Israeli oppression of stateless Palestinians and by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsual (AQAP) in Yemen, not by Daesh, with which it appears to have had nothing to do.

The distance between Mosul, now the major Daesh population center, and al-Raqqa, the Daesh capital, is roughly the same distance as from Elk City Oklahoma in the west of the state to Tulsa, OK in its east. The population living under Daesh rule is likely about the same as the population of Oklahoma.

So, Daesh is not the Soviet Union. It is Oklahoma without much infrastructure, wealth or so much as steady phone service, electricity and internet.

(In contrast, the distance between Aswan in Egypt and Alexandria in that country is roughly the same as between Washington DC and Lincoln, Nebraska, and Egypt is a country of nearly 90 million, where radical Islam or even just Muslim fundamentalism is more or less forbidden).

Obama is clearly frustrated that right wing radio and cable television, and even mainstream cable television, have interacted with the more belligerent GOP presidential candidates to project Daesh as some sort of evil superpower (former senator Rick Santorum is talking about World War III) and an existential threat to the United States.

I suppose if Obama were more of a politician, he would just deliver fiery oratory about the need to wage war on Daesh. Telling Americans that their nightmares are overblown is never a winning political strategy.

Daesh has two arenas of operation. It is trying to take and keep territory in Syria and Iraq. And, it has a terror wing that encourages operations on Western soil.

With regard to the territory, Daesh has already seen its best days and is now in decline. In summer of 2014 when people in Mosul and Falluja opened their doors to it, there was talk of Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan’s Erbil falling to it. That outcome was never very likely, since Daesh typically can only take a city if the city is full of Sunni Muslims hoping it will deliver them from oppression at the hands of other religious or ethnic groups. Baghdad is now a largely Shiite city and the Kurds will never accept Daesh.

In the past 18 months, Daesh has been contained and then rolled back. It was pushed back out of Samarra. It has lost Beiji and Tikrit. Falluja appears to be in play. It is losing Ramadi, which has been cut off from supply lines to Syria. Ramadi the most vulnerable of Sunni Arab cities in Iraq to attacks from the Shiite south and it was never likely Daesh could hold it in the long term.

On the Kurdish front, the Peshmerga have regrouped and gotten better training and arms. They pushed Daesh out of Kurdish areas in Diyala province. In Ninewah province, they took back Mt. Sinjar, hundreds of miles from Erbil, and then recently took back Sinjar city.

In Syria, Daesh was prevented from taking Kobane and has lost half of al-Raqqa Province, its base. It is being blocked by the Syrian Arab Army, Hizbullah and Russian fighter jets from moving into Aleppo (where even rebel-dominated east Aleppo rejects it).

The situation of Daesh in its capital, al-Raqqa, is so uncertain that there has been talk of them evacuating it toward Mosul. It is being bombed there now by the French and British, a new development this fall. Likewise, Russia has bombed their oil trucks.

This screen shot from YouTube clearly shows that Daesh had lost substantial territory even by the middle of last summer. It has lost more since.

I don’t deny that the wheels have moved slowly. But you can’t say there has been no progress. There are a lot of problems with mainly enlisting Shiites and Kurds to crush Daesh. They can do it, and probably could do it on an accelerated schedule. But it is much better to have Sunni Arabs play a big role. Reports suggest that they are playing such a role in taking back Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar province, and have finally been armed by the government of Haydar al-Abadi. Contrary to what Lindsey Graham thinks, US troops would not be more welcome as liberators in the Sunni Arab cities than would Shiite or Kurdish troops.

As for Daesh plots abroad, they don’t seem very professional and depend heavily on just encouraging lone wolves to hit soft targets. That kind of thing is upsetting, but it isn’t likely to result in the overthrow of the government.

Daesh is trolling the West. They want to create polarization between Christians and Muslims, and then pick up the Muslims by telling them they can protect them from violent Christian attacks. They want to stay in the limelight so as to attract foreign fighters and the money of Gulf oil millionaires. They want to inspire fear and hate.

On the domestic front, the effective way to combat them is to refuse to be afraid and to refuse to hate.

The idea that this small desert band that flourishes, as Obama said, in the straitened spaces where states have collapsed, could force us by saying “boo!” to abrogate the 4th amendment or the 8th amendment and stampede us into hateful hysteria, is unthinkable. If it happens, the fault won’t lie with Daesh. It will lie with us.

So Obama has this difficulty, of seeing the situation proportionally, and of conveying to the public the adequate amount of reassurance and alarm. But given the klaxons sounding 24/7 on cable television, social media and at Trump rallies, Obama’s measured, clear-eyed estimations are being drowned out and discounted, even by seasoned journalists.

The reason that “clear-eyed estimations” are discounted in favor of “klaxons sounding 24/7” to “stampede us into hateful hysteria” is that economic concentrations did not exist when the US Constitution was written, so that business gangs now control the mass media and elections, the principal institutions of democracy. Right wing fearmongers must create foreign monsters to pose as protectors to demand domestic power and accuse their opponents of disloyalty. The right wing are not conservative at all, they conserve nothing but their own gold, they are revolutionaries against democracy, and fearmongering has been their means of tyranny over democracy throughout history, as Aristotle warned. It is time for amendments to restrict funding of mass media and elections to limited and registered individual contributions.

Why isn’t the car incident in Las Vegas a terrorist act? How about the Planned Parenthood shooter? Should we be declaring war on homeless people or fundamentalist Christians? Or is there no “story with legs” there?
War scares are great for big business (and many small contractors and consultants too). The big-corporate owned media just want eyeballs on their websites, pages, and tv programs. Horse races in politics and fantasy war reporting attracts visitors. Sensible, fact-based reporting does not. The major media play to the lowest common denominator in American prejudice and fear and , unfortunately, it works for them. Like many things in life, people tend to get what they deserve or what they will put up with.
Although I disagree with much of what Obama has done, and failed to do, this time he is absolutely right. His honest assessment will be ridiculed, overshadowed by media reports from the fear-mongers or just buried.

With regard to the territory, Daesh has already seen its best days and is now in decline.

People were saying the same thing about al-Qaeda a few years ago and they are still around. It could be that al-Qaeda and Daesh will be eventually eliminated as entities, but the motivating factors that inspired them and possibly others in the future are another proposition.

Where? Wherever they choose to operate. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Yemen, North Africa. Perhaps not in fixed and enduring geographical terms, but they existed before 9/11 and are still around. And a threat. Like a virus.

Where were you in 2001? Al Qaeda dominated the Taliban government of Afghanistan and had the run of the country. One reason that the Taliban were so easily run out of power was that most Afghans despised the “Arabs” that were dominating their politics in partnership with the Taliban.

Very few people are informed about the history of warfare, political development, the over throw of governments, etc. Both terrorism and guerrilla warfare are signs of weakness, not strength. Groups or nations engage in those tactics because they lack the military or economic strength to gain their ends through other means. Even with strong guerrilla armies, they become victorious only if the established state collapses or the guerrilla forces become strong enough to form a regular army and defeat the established state in open battle (Communists defeating the Nationalists in China, which was really a combination of both). Terrorism against soft targets succeeds, as Professor Cole points out, only when the victim population over reacts. I was in high school at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since we were no more than 5 miles from a major military base, we went to school not knowing if we would come home or be vaporized by a nuclear attack. That was a real threat. I currently live only about 20 miles from the San Bernardino attack. ISIS is nothing compared to the threats of the Cold War.

ISIS may only be a bunch of gangsters, but imagine if the Latin Kings took over Texas, from the government on down. Or if the Mafia did the same to New York and New Jersey. And if they had an actual political ideology to motivate them, to kill and die for, they wouldn’t be merely gangsters. Stalin started out as an extortionist in the oil fields of Baku. Mao and his party financed themselves through banditry. The founding fathers of the United States probably looked a lot like gangsters to Great Britain.

Bigotry against Muslims, racism against the peoples who believe in Mohammed is wrong and can only bring more misery to everyone. But how big or small the actual threat of ISIS has nothing to do with it.

That hardly was an argument, Juan. Over-estimating the threat of ISIS is dangerous and being hawkish when it comes to dealing with that threat is unwise, but under-estimating them because of some reactionary anti-hawkish knee-jerk opinion in an “article” like this is just as unwise.

While Trump falls into the extreme over-estimation side, you seem to fall in the severe under-estimation side of the camp, because it fits your political stance.

Your historical analogies about Stalin and Mao are weak and inapplicable. If it wasn’t for WWI, the Bolsheviks would have probably been a footnote in history and the same for the Chinese Communists if the Japanese hadn’t invaded China. ISIS success to date is due to a power vacuum and their only real threat is to parts of Iraq and Syria.

Daesch or ISIS or ISIL or whatever they’re being called now is a prop, put in play in a propagandistic attempt to justify militant western imperialism to the taxpayers who finance it. We are the real bad guys.

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